Tag: new release

Access for Beginners and Intermediate Access are now live in ebook on Amazon and making their way to all the usual places. (Paperbacks should be live soon, too, but will take a day or two to link up to the ebook.)

I’m pretty sure these are books I said at one point that I’d never write because even though I use Access on a regular basis and find it essential to tracking all of my publishing results I never quite felt I knew it well enough to write a book on it.

So I finally went out a bought a book that someone else had written on Access to see how much beginner/intermediate knowledge I actually had. And it turns out that I knew about 95% of what I needed to write the books.

And, more importantly, that the way I think about how to use Access is completely different from the way the author of that other book thought about Access. It literally made my brain hurt to try to follow the way that person presented Access. Which made me realize there might be a need out there for the way I think about it.

So I wrote it.

These ones are longer than the ones on Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. And I’d recommend being familiar with Excel before you start them. But hopefully they help at least one person out there to master Access, because I really do think it’s an incredibly useful tool (for those circumstances where it makes sense, which in my opinion are somewhat limited these days).

It took me over a year to write it because I truly do not like SmartArt and that had to be covered in an intermediate-level guide to PowerPoint (I find people misuse it atrociously), but it’s finally done.

So if you wanted an intermediate-level guide to PowerPoint that covers charts, shapes, WordArt, SmartArt, headers and footers, and a lot more, here you go. (And the paperback and hardback versions on currently almost 20% off on Barnes & Noble for those of you who like print.) Click on the image below for the universal link.

I forgot to announce that I released a new title a few days ago called Data Principles for Beginners. If you’ve read the Excel titles you’ll note that I make mention throughout those books about issues I’ve run into on data projects I worked on with respect to structuring data or analyzing it.

Well, this book takes all of those little mentions and puts them in one place as well as exploring a few other key principles that will make life a lot easier for anyone trying to work with their data.

It’s been a busy week. I know better than to do this to myself, but I just released six new titles. The big one is Mail Merge for Beginners, which covers how to create customized letters, envelopes, and mailing labels in Microsoft Word using an Excel-based list of entries.

And, because it’s a pretty short and sweet guide, it’s only $2.99. So if that’s something you need (I certainly used mail merge back when I was working as a secretary at my dad’s little sign shop), then check it out.

It will also be available in paperback for $7.99. The paperback is up on Amazon now, but not yet linked to the ebook–that should happen in a couple days–but it will come up in search. It will slowly make its way to anywhere else you like to buy paperbacks in the next couple of weeks.

In addition to the mail merge book, I also just released five titles in a series called Easy Word Essentials. These books take specific topics from Word for Beginners and Intermediate Word and present them as standalone topics. They cover text formatting, page formatting, lists, tables, and track changes.

So if any of those topics are of interest and you haven’t already bought the two main Word titles, then those might be worth checking out as well. Each one is $2.99 and the paperbacks are $7.99. Same situation as above, the paperbacks aren’t yet linked on Amazon but can be found with a search and will be soon. They will also make their way to other platforms over the next couple weeks.

Easy Word Essentials

And now I can go enjoy my Easter and get back to proofing the next cozy mystery. Those murders don’t solve themselves, you know. 🙂 Happy holiday and/or family time to you all.

When I originally wrote 50 Useful Excel Functions I chose those functions from a list of about 125 total functions I thought could be really useful to someone. I didn’t want to write them all up in one book because that’s just too much to handle for the average user in my opinion.

But it wasn’t easy to narrow that list down either, because which functions a user considers most useful will very much depend on why they’re using Excel. I also had to include in that book certain functions just for completeness sake. If I was going to discuss X function then I also really needed to discuss Y and Z functions, too.

Which meant that I was left with about a hundred functions that I didn’t cover in the first book but that I figured a certain number of users might want to know about.

Well, now I’ve covered another batch of them in 50 More Excel Functions.

This one really digs into some of the date and time functions and discusses the quirks of how Excel handles dates, at least one of which threw me a nasty surprise on a work project a few years ago. Hint: Don’t work with really old dates in Excel, it doesn’t turn out well.

Remember that book I wasn’t planning on writing but realized how to write while walking my dog? I published it today. It has the oh-so-pretentious title of Achieve Writing Success. (Somehow Thoughts on Self-Publishing or Thoughts on Writing seemed a little too…eh.)

Interestingly, this is a book I have been trying to write in some form or another for a couple of years now. Originally it was going to be Self-Publishing 101. Except I didn’t really want to write a self-publishing 101 book. I know how I do things and I really didn’t want to cover the nitty gritty of all the different options. For example, I formatted my ebooks in Word for the first four years and then switched to Vellum. I had no interest in discussing Cailbre or Sigil or hand-coded HTML. But I felt I would have to if I did a how-to on self-publishing.

So every time I tried to write that book I stopped at about the 10K word mark. Because what I really wanted to share was some thoughts on self-publishing and, as it turns out, publishing in general.

Some of the things I’ve shared here already. Like why self-publishing shouldn’t be considered your Plan B when you fail at trade publishing. Or about how you shouldn’t let someone else control your dreams if it means that much to you to see your book out in the world.

And some I’ve discussed with folks along the way. Like the fact that it’s an error to focus solely on print books if you self-publish or to think in terms of print runs instead of POD.

I originally thought it was going to be for self-publishers but ended up gearing it towards any writer who has at least a novel under their belt, because I think some of the lessons are ones that those still on the trade publishing path really need to consider, too.

Anyway. It’s done now. Phew. No more stopping every six months to try to write a book that isn’t what I really wanted to write but that I feel needs to exist. (The bane of my existence that bad habit of mine of writing books I don’t think will sell but do think should exist.)

There’s snow on the ground this morning. The first of the season. Which is sad because it was so absolutely gorgeous yesterday. Pup and I spent a good part of the day sitting outside enjoying the day while I read and she rubbed her nose in the grass.

Once the snow falls she still wants to be outside and I want to be comfy and cozy inside. This is not from today, but here she is enjoying the snow:

She’d sit there like that all day if I’d stay outside with her…

Unfortunately for her, I won’t. Love her, but love warm toes more.

I’m also happy to announce that the last non-fiction title I was working on is now live in ebook: ACX for Beginners. This is for anyone thinking about putting their book into audio through ACX. It does also cover more general topics like pros/cons of going into audio, what you can make from it, what to look for in a narrator, and how to review audio files once submitted.

Of the presentations I gave at RMFW this year, the one on ACX was the one that had the most people coming up to me later to say they really enjoyed it and found value in it. I’d meant to have this book completed by the conference but got distracted writing those Excel guides. (And good thing I did…I’m loving that StoryBundle experience.)

And, finally. Last week I joked that maybe I needed to change up the cover on You Have a Date since it didn’t have a half-naked woman on it, so I did. Here are the old and new covers:

I do think the new cover is more effective if a little harder to read. We’ll see. Since most of Douchebag’s sales are in audio, I won’t really know if this works until the audio cover is up. That could take a couple weeks. (I did also turn on an old AMS ad on the book, so I might see some ebook or print sales off of that, but not sure the ad is still moving. And the next time I tried for an AMS ad on this book they rejected it because of the book’s title so that’s the only ad I can run on it.)

One of the nice things about doing your own covers is that you can do something like this in less than a day and for just the cost of the image. (I already had it, but I downloaded a new copy just to be kosher. It cost me 50 cents because of that AppSumo deal I mentioned recently.)

So that’s me. Still need to do the paperback version of the ACX book and then it’s time for fiction. FINALLY! I didn’t expect to take such a long break from novels, but I think it was worth it.